Well Groomed (63 page)

‘It’s a bit messy in here, innit?’ The photographer sniffed disapprovingly. ‘People usually tidy up for us. Can you hold down that dog, love? Only it looks like it’s going to bite Niall.’

Suddenly Tash had to fight hard to control a fit of giggles. The situation was too absurd to take seriously. But catching Niall watching her, she saw that, despite the relaxed smile and comic charm, his eyes were almost black with misery. It was as though someone had dropped an ice cube down her back. Saying ‘cheese’ this late in the day was going to give her nightmares.

Niall practically had to throw them out in the end. The moment they had gone, his cheery façade dropped with an almost audible clang. He was as jumpy as a cat in a thunderstorm, Tash noticed. No wonder Beetroot had looked eager to savage him during the farce of a photo-shoot.

‘I can’t believe we just went through with that,’ she whispered, watching him worriedly as he poured himself a scotch. His hands were shaking so much that most of it slopped over the stone-topped table.

‘I honestly didn’t know they were coming.’ He turned to her, his face white. ‘Lisette must have organised it and forgotten to tell me. Jesus!’

‘Has something happened?’ Tash sat down heavily on the sofa, not liking the way his eyes were staring at her with that baleful, apologetic sadness that always preceded bad news. ‘You told me you were going to try and sort something out today?’

‘Christ, I thought it might work.’ He rubbed his forehead in agitation. ‘I’m sorry, Tash. So fuckingly, hellishly sorry. I’ve just made things worse.’

‘What do you mean, made things worse?’ Tash gazed at him. ‘I thought they were about as bad as they could get?’

‘Oh, no.’ He shook his head. ‘Last night all we had to worry about was the fact that I stand to get sued once we break the news that the wedding’s off.’

‘I think breaking it to my family might cause us a few headaches,’ she reminded him. ‘I’m pretty certain that my father, for one, will never forgive me for doing this to him.’

Another gill of scotch slid down his throat in one. ‘I’m sorry, angel, I know they’re going to freak – my mother will be out for my blood too. But, believe me, I wouldn’t ask this of you if it were just a matter of saving my skin.’

‘Ask what of me?’

He was already hitting his third glass. ‘You have to promise me something.’

‘What?’ Tash wanted to dive-bomb the bottle and throw it from the window. He was escaping into it faster than a fox into a familiar den, and within minutes he’d be back in character again, fobbing her off with that trust-me charm that belonged to the irresistible liar from Four Poster Bed.

‘You must promise me,’ he said shakily, eyes locked on hers in desperation, ‘that you’ll pretend the wedding is going ahead for a while. You have to believe me, Tash. If we don’t act like we’re getting hitched a fortnight this Saturday, you stand to lose almost as much as I do.’

‘What?’ Tash froze. ‘What do I stand to lose?’

But he closed his eyes tightly to evade the question. ‘Promise me, Tash!’

Something in his tone made Tash’s skin feel as though she had just been plunged into a liquid nitrogen bath. She gazed at his creased, unshaven face with its familiar grooves gouged out into far deeper troughs by tension and tiredness. He looked absolutely desperate.

‘What do I stand to lose, Niall?’ She suddenly felt terrified.

Starting to cry, he pressed his forehead to his clenched fist and shook his head. ‘I’ll find a way out of this, I swear to God I will. But you have to promise me you’ll keep quiet.’

Unable to bear seeing him so unhappy, Tash stumbled across the room to hug him in her arms, resting her chin on his head like a mother with a distraught child.

‘I promise,’ she said hollowly.

That seemed to satisfy him. He bounced back to his energetic Tigger charm, drinking his way through the rest of the bottle and telling her about his day as though his recent weeping had never happened. Trying to get him to talk about it again was impossible – his light, witty, dilettante character role was impenetrable. Battling to get through, Tash was almost demented with frustration and worry. Half an hour later, and he had sloped off to the Olive Branch to meet ‘the guys’. He even had the nerve to ask her along too.

‘Hugo and Lisette might be there,’ he told her, as though that was a selling point.

Tash shook her head, horrified how easily the mention of that particular couple could thump the air from her chest.

She was left to stew in solitude, appalled by what she had just agreed to. Starting to feel paranoid, she almost wondered if he’d tricked her into it, if he was somehow trying to get her to agree to Bob’s ridiculous altar-cation idea after all. He’d said she had as much to lose as he did, but she was wary of him at the moment, uncertain how much of what he told her was the truth, and how much was some fabrication he was dreaming up in his new character. If only he hadn’t looked so completely wretched, she might have challenged him. But, however good an actor he was, he couldn’t cry like that on cue. Nor could he feign the inebriated ramblings he came out with when he staggered back in at midnight. He could hardly walk, let alone put in a Bafta-worthy performance.

‘Stefan was there – with Kirsty.’ He fell over Beetroot, not noticing when she sank her teeth into his ankle. ‘We had a chat about Snob, so we did.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Tash watched with alarm as he tripped into the kitchen with Beetroot still attached.

‘They say you stand a good chance of winning Shuttlecock.’

‘Badminton.’ Tash whistled Beetroot away.

‘That too.’ He head-butted a cupboard as he searched for a fresh bottle of whiskey. ‘Kirsty claims the horse is one of the top five in the country. Worth almost a million, so she says.’

‘That’s right.’ She tried not to notice that he was now trying to pour Bushmills into a small glass measuring jug by mistake.

‘But Stefan said you’d rather sell your soul than sell Snob,’ he slurred, and then giggled as he realised that he was tipping up the bottle without unscrewing the top.

Tash froze. He couldn’t be suggesting what she thought he was, could he? That she should sell Snob to pay his way out of the publicity deal? Then she almost blacked out as she remembered that Snob officially belonged to Niall anyway. There was nothing stopping him from selling her beloved, rebellious chestnut friend if he wanted to. The money he would get from it would almost certainly solve his problem. He’d probably even have enough left over to purchase a yacht and take out a lifetime’s off-shore subscription to
Cheers!

‘What are you saying, Niall?’ she croaked, her voice almost packing up on her as she fought not to cry.

He settled back against a kitchen cupboard and gazed vaguely in her direction, eyes crossing and uncrossing as though he was trying to count the freckles on his nose.

‘Will you marry me, Tash?’ he hiccuped.

She shook her head in bewilderment.

‘Will you?’ he repeated.

‘No, Niall.’ She carried on shaking her head.

‘In that case,’ he closed his eyes, ‘we’ve both sold our souls. I always said we were soul mates.’

He was so drunk that he passed out on the floor of the kitchen, sleeping soundly with his mouth open, the empty measuring jug gripped tightly in his hand.

He was far too heavy to lift, so Tash could only settle for making him more comfortable with a pillow and a blanket, positioning the washing-up bowl beside him in case he felt sick in the night. He was so desperately pitiable that she felt no anger, just a hollow drum-roll of panic booming through her chest.

BY THE FRIDAY OF Zoe’s dinner party, Tash was aware that she was falling apart big time. Her riding was going to pot and neither of her Badminton horses was giving an inch. Unable to concentrate, she was only making things worse by letting them get away with murder.

Her more experienced ride, Hunk, was suffering a fit of dressage boredom and shuffling around the schooling ring like a toe-scuffing teenager forced to endure a seaside trip with his grandparents, and Snob was behaving even more badly – treating each training session as a rein-wrestling match where he took her on and won almost every time. He had never behaved as atrociously as he was now, and Tash knew that it was largely her fault. He was a horse who required endless riding in and calming down, but she simply hadn’t had the time lately. Over the past month, wrapped up in her worries about Niall and increasingly involved in promotional work with her new sponsors, she had started to neglect the enormous input Snob had grown accustomed to. With a bigger, stronger rider on board he wouldn’t need the same hours, but because Tash simply wasn’t physically strong enough to hold him when he became overexcited, she had to rely upon having his total concentration and confidence at all times, particularly now that she had got him so fit for Badminton.

With her nerves as ragged as they were right now, she found it almost impossible to rally her usual gritty determination and patiently bring him around to her way of thinking.

Trying to persuade him to take a row of fences in the menage on Friday morning, she suffered the shame of being spotted by Gus just as Snob ducked out of the middle element and sent the wing crashing to the sand.

‘Christ!’ He covered his eyes and headed back towards the house. ‘I can’t bear to watch.’

Tash felt her face flame. She knew that her riding was abysmally shabby at the moment, but it didn’t make the humiliation any the less. She was also aware that, despite his cynicism, Gus was extremely concerned about her. He’d already bawled her out earlier that week, telling her that for someone who had more talent than any pupil he’d ever worked with, she was currently displaying the riding skills of a dead antelope strapped across a pack pony’s shoulders. It was the first time he’d ever admitted she had talent at all.

She watched as Ted bounded into the ring to haul up the wing for her, cackling loudly.

‘Don’t worry, Tash, it’s not the winging that counts, it’s the taking part!’ he hooted.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered glumly.

Later on Snob was in no mood to mooch around the lanes idling a few hours away. He was fit and primed and overexcited because one of Gus’s mares was in season. As a result, he left Tash up on the ridgeway five miles from home, and she was forced to call in on the Haydown yard en route back to the farm to beg a lift to search for him.

She hoped to God that she encountered Stefan or one of the grooms. The thought of bumping into Hugo with her red, unrested eyes, greasy hair and nervous spots appalled her. She had battled and battled to keep him to the back of her mind this week, not altogether successfully. Images of Hugo and Lisette entwined like two sleek, spoiled cats, writhing playfully in his huge, archaic bed, haunted her. Yet lately, her thoughts about him had turned unhealthily quixotic too. She’d needed a fix to stop her cracking up, and she had been hitting the imagination juices almost as often as Niall had been hitting the bottle.

One of the things that was keeping her sane throughout this nightmare was a silly, crazed fantasy which she clung to in the worst moments of free-fall panic, like a refugee child clutching a bright bobbing balloon while the city around her was being razed to the ground. In her most escapist moments, she let herself dream that Hugo would save her from her predicament. She’d started imagining a scenario in which he leaped up during the wedding ceremony, just as the registrar was asking the guests whether they knew of any reason for the marriage not to take place.

‘Yes!’ he’d drawl. (He always drawled in her fantasies, she noticed. And his hair was always wind-swept – even indoors, as though there was an electric fan on the go.) ‘I do!’

At this point all the guests would turn, gasping, to face him, and he’d stride up the aisle (wearing his dressage breeches usually) to take her hand.

‘Tash is one half of my beating heart,’ he’d drawl more softly, his voice hoarse with love, blue eyes devouring her face. ‘And without her by my side for the rest of my life, I’ll have no heart to live. Sorry, Niall mate.’ At which point he’d whisk her into his arms and carry her from the room to Niall’s intense relief and her father’s apoplectic fury.

Her mind fully occupied by this fairytale, Tash walked into the location shoot in full swing.

The place was crawling with film types, indulging in the usual tea-swigging from plastic cups, huddled chatter and clip-board waggling. There were several equipment lorries, plus over a dozen vans and cars parked randomly on the drive, and Hugo’s front lawns were scattered with huge tripods holding powerful film lights like great mutant lollipops.

She could not even get through the front gates as the team was frantically filming establishing shots before they lost the light. A minion with a walkie-talkie hustled her away as officiously as a royal body-guard, and she had to run on through the narrow Maccombe lanes and then half a mile into the countryside to Hugo’s back driveway. Trudging along the pitted mud track, her ribs pinched with a stitch now, she suddenly spotted him in a nearby field, pounding Bodybuilder around in circles over the dusty tracks of an old sand school. Flame-faced from running and drenched in sweat, she ducked behind a spindly hawthorn bush and caught her breath so that she could leg it past without being seen. But it was as though a great elastic band was pulling her eyes towards him again and again.

Creeping closer to the railed fence that divided them, Tash paused to watch through the hawthorn leaves, revelling in the skills of horse and rider. Bod was as supple as a snake, twisting and flexing under Hugo’s effortless control, his sleek, black body glistening in the sun like crude oil being poured around the ring, red nostrils arched in two angry blazes of colour like second eyes, muscles taut as they flexed in tight constraint beneath the drum-tight black skin. In many ways, the horse reminded her of Snob – he had the same explosive temperament, endless stamina and determined, hell-bent will. Like Snob, he was as heavily built as a Mercedes, exquisitely proportioned and as brave as a lion. Unlike Snob, he was utterly obedient to Hugo’s every whim.